DISCOVERY FUELS IMAGINATION
Origins of Wayne Grady’s novels spring from revelatory family history
Up From Freedom Wayne Grady Doubleday Canada
KINGSTON, ONT. Award-winning author Wayne Grady thought he was white for the first 46 years of his life.
But then came the day in 1997 when he was checking old records in the reference department of the Windsor Public Library and discovered his black heritage.
He had accompanied his wife, fellow writer Merilyn Simonds, to the library that day because she needed to do some research of her own.
“So I thought I’d look up my family history because I knew so little of it,” the Windsor-born Grady remembers. “I was in another chair looking up census reports from the 1880s and 1890s. That’s where I discovered my great-grandfather’s name and under the column for ‘colour’ he was listed as black.”
He remembers experiencing shock — and also anger over the fact that he’d been kept in the dark about his family history.
“But I felt surprise, mostly,” he says. Furthermore, the writer in him was already taking hold as he stared at those old census records. “So my second thought was — there’s a book here!”
Actually, there have been two books so far. His 2013 novel, Emancipation Day, dealt with a Royal Canadian Navy veteran who passes for white. But his latest work of fiction, Up From Freedom, plunges the reader into the 19th-century United States before the abolition of slavery. Again it is driven by Grady’s own family history.
The novel, published by Doubleday, moves with the pace of a thriller and climaxes with an astonishing trial in an Indiana courtroom.
He had traced his father’s ancestors back to their arrival in the small Indiana town of Spencer in 1835. He was staggered by what he learned.
“I travelled there and discovered that my great-great-grandparents had been arrested for fornication and that a real trial had taken place. They could not be married because it was illegal for blacks to marry whites, so therefore they were living in sin. All I knew was the charge and the outcome.”
That outcome must have rocked the courtroom at the time — and Grady yearned to know more.
“There was just this one little paragraph in the records,” he sighs. “I had to use my own imagination.”
“I had no idea what the lawyers said or did. But there was this feeling at the time that blacks and whites were two separate species, and that with blacks it was no different from dealing with horses or cattle or mules. It was hard for me to think like that.”
The central character of Up From Freedom is Virgil Moodie, a slave owner’s son who has vowed that he will never own slaves. When he leaves the family plantation, he takes along a pregnant young slave named Annie, determined to free her and save her from further abuse.
He, Annie, and her son, Lucas, end up making a life together, but Annie — sharp-tongued and sharpwitted — never lets him forget the reality of their racial divide.
That reality makes a tragic intrusion into their lives, leaving a family shattered and Virgil consumed by guilt over his role. As he moves through a troubled American landscape in the volatile years before the outbreak of civil war, he tells himself that he’s searching for Lucas who has gone missing, but he’s also in need of redemption. And he finds the opportunity when he meets Tamsey, a former slave, who with her family is heading north in an attempt to escape the insidious reach of the Fugitive Slave Act.
“So much of American fiction is about redemption, the search for redemption,” Grady says over lunch in the courtyard of a downtown Kingston restaurant. “And I knew that Moodie was not going to find an easy redemption after what he had done to Annie and Lucas. He had to earn it by now proving to Tamsey and her family that he would help them.”
Grady is 70 now. More than two decades have passed since his life was changed by what he discovered in the Windsor library. But there’s a serenity about him. For one thing, after a successful career writing non-fiction books and translating works by Quebec authors, he has finally fulfilled a lifelong ambition to write fiction.
The 2013 Emancipation Day, which began as a work of nonfiction, ended up as a novel.
But it was still fuelled by Grady ’s own personal quest — and by anger with his father for being in denial about their heritage, for not telling him the truth about their family history.
“I was angry for a long time — primarily because I’d been raised without an extended family,” Grady says.
He hadn’t realized how much of a deprivation this was until he met his present wife, Merilyn Simonds. “She was so close to her family that I suddenly realized that families do keep in touch with each other. But it took me a long time to get over that anger.”
Emancipation Day, which won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, represented Grady’s attempt to come to terms with the actions of a parent who was light-skinned enough to pass for white. “I wrote it to try to understand what my father must have been thinking at the time.”
Still, Emancipation Day did not bring full closure “In this new book, Up To Freedom, I wanted to explain how my family got to where it did.”
But Grady still needs to examine himself more closely. Hence, the third novel on which he is now working.
“I’m still exploring what this discovery has meant to me — how it affects me,” he says.” That’s what the third novel, which is contemporary, will look at.”
And what does he hope from his readers?
“I want people to ask questions. I don’t think fiction exists to provide answers to the deeper questions, but I think we have to learn to ask the right questions.”